Here I will post some short pieces on Sarala Mahabharata. Sarala Das is known as the "aadikavi" (the first poet) of Oriya Literature. He lived and wrote in the 15th Century. Mahabharat is his magnum opus. The episodes in Sarala's Mahabharat are significantly different from those in Vyasa's (Sanskrit) Mahabharat.

Monday, April 10, 2017

I AM SITTING, O SON OF GOLAKA

(aho
golakaputra mubasuchi) said
Bhima to Duryodhana as the latter invited him to take his seat in the Kuru
court, saying, “take your seat, O son of Pavana (pabanaputra basa)”. The family elders, Bhishma and Bhurishrava, clapped
and laughed loudly. ‘How on earth, did you get to know of this secret?”, they asked
Bhima, not expecting an answer and not receiving one. Duryodhana was stung by
all these. Before anyone could make sense of what had happened, Duryodhana left
the court.

He entered a room in the palace and closed the
door from inside. When the time came for food, the royal cooks looked for him. When
they traced him, they entreated him to have his food. But he wouldn’t open the
door. Then came Sanjaya and Vidura. They failed to persuade him to open the
door. Soon came the venerable elders: Bhishma and Bhurishrava. “What troubles
you?”, they asked. “There is a time for food”, they told him; “once the sun
sets, having food was prohibited”. So he must come out and dine. Duryodhana was
unmoved. His father came. What on earth could he, the lord of the land, want
and would not get, asked Dhritarashtra. Then arrived the great Karna, his close
friend. “Why are you so upset”, he asked him. Duryodhana said nothing to
anyone.

Finally came mother: Gandhari. “You are the one
favoured by fortune. You are the lord of the kingdom. You have the authority
and the power to destroy anyone who offends you. Then why are you so very
upset?”, she asked him. Sleeping on an improper bed brought misfortune, she
told him; a bed of grass was not worthy of a kshatriya, certainly not of a
kshatriya as powerful and noble as he, she said. Therefore he must abandon it
forthwith, she told her son.

Duryodhana responded to his mother’s words.
Bhima had insulted him in the court that morning, calling him “golakaputra”, he told her. Bhishma and
Bhurishrava had laughed. He had felt very hurt and humiliated. She, the
daughter of king Gandharasena, was his mother and Dhritarashtra was his father.
Then what was his being golakaputra
about, he virtually demanded of her.

Gandhari scolded her son. She told him bluntly
that what had happened was all due to his folly and wickedness and he was now
reaping what he had sown. Yudhisthira was his elder brother and instead of showing
him due respect, he tried to hurt him by addressing him, day after day, as the
“son of Dharma”, while asking him to take his seat in the court. Were those
five not his own, whom he humiliated every day in the court addressing them as
the “son of Dharma”, the “son of Pavana’, etc., she asked him. Dhritarashtra
and Pandu were brothers; and whatever was the weakness of one was the weakness
of the other. He should have known that whatever would be embarrassing to
Yudhisthira would be embarrassing to him too; whatever would shame Yudhisthira
would shame him too.

As for golakaputra,
she told him that she would tell him everything, but he must first have his
food. Duryodhana told her that she must first tell him about that dark, shameful
secret encapsulated in that word and only then would he have his meal. Gandhari
then began the story.

She was born on the moonless day in the month
of Jyestha during the ascendancy of the nakshatra called “Krutika”. That was a
very inauspicious time for a girl to be born.Such a girl was called “Uansi”
and she being an uansi”, no one dared
to marry her for fear of death. Her father tried to arrange her marriage but
the prince would die even as the engagement took place. Twenty-two times had her
father tried to arrange her marriage and twenty-two princes had died. Then her
father sought sage Vyasa’s help.

The celebrated sage advised king Gandharasena
to marry her to a golaka (commonly
known as “sahada”) tree. There was a
big golaka tree in the palace itself.
The sage dressed the tree as a bridegroom. He himself conducted the wedding.
The ceremony was performed in utmost secrecy. He tied the bride’s hand to a
branch of that tree. The king performed the necessary rituals as the bride’s
father. As soon as the wedding took place, the huge tree died.

Gandhari told her son how, then, Vyasa arranged
her marriage with Dhritarashtra, who was also born in an inauspicious moment. One
hundred and eight princesses had died after engagement with him. No father was
willing to marry his daughter to him. It was a very embarrassing situation for
the great Kuru family but they could do nothing. At the behest of the venerable
sage, Dhritarashtra came to Gandhara and the sage himself performed her
marriage with him, said Gandhari. The computational linguist and scholar, brahmachari
Vineet Chaitanya, asks what the poet Sarala says about why Gandhari did not
die. Sarala says nothing but, keeping in view the spirit of the narrative, one
can surmise that a sage like Vyasa, with such great spiritual attainment had
the yogic power to neutralize the effect of malignant constellations. Later the
sage played a significant role in Dhritarashtra’s having a hundred sons whereas
Gandhari and he were destined to have just one daughter.

The circumstances of her marriage were a secret
in the Kuru family. Outside the family, only Vasudeva knew, Gandhari told
Duryodhana. The poet does not tell us how Krishna knew. But the reader of
course knows how - in Sarala Mahabharata
nothing happened without Krishna’s knowledge. He didn’t have to be told.
Because he was the doer of all that was done. Unaware of this, others deluded
themselves to be doers. And Krishna would sometimes help them nourish such
illusions about themselves. Such was his lila.

To return to Gandhari and Duryodhana. Gandhari
told him that it was only his misdemeanour that let that secret of the family
out. Duryodhana was dismayed. He was extremely sad. Not because of the attitude
of his mother. Not because of her blaming him for what had come to pass. What
was killing him was his knowing that what Bhima had said was true and that
henceforth in the court, day after day, he would taunt him calling him golakaputra. He wondered how he knew.
But he was not the kind to trouble himself at that traumatic moment of
self-discovery about discovering the source of Bhima’s information!

All the bitterness, frustration and anger of
Duryodhana now found a target in his maternal grandfather, king Gandharasena. How
could that wretched person dare to marry her to his father, he shouted at his
mother. “If you were born so unlucky, why didn’t you stay in your father’s
house and die there?’, he said to her. He knew that there was nothing he could
do now to undo what had happened. He calmed himself, quietly left the place,
bathed and performed the daily rituals.

When they returned from the court that day,
Yudhisthira chided Bhima. What he had done was unethical, he told him. Why did
he call Duryodhana golakaputra, he
asked him. Bhima said that he had done no wrong. Duryodhana had been taunting
them every day and his brothers were mocking at them, as he named their different
fathers. They had to swallow that humiliation day after day. The son of Dharma
was unmoved. His father’s name was Dhritarashtra and his mother’s, Gandhari.
Knowing this, why did he call him the son of golaka, he asked gain. All Bhima said was that if that were indeed
the case, then why was Duryodhana so upset?

2 comments:

Sarala Mahabharata is not online. It has not been translated into English. As for its translation in the Indisn languages, about a year back, the Hindi translation of only the first two Parvas was published. I am told that part of Sarala Mahabharata was rendered into Bengali more than a century ago. It is unavailable now, to the best of my knowledge.

As for what I'm doing, I am merely presenting some key stories from Sarala Mahabharata in English. I am interpreting them of course, but in doing so I am taking great care that my interpretations are very faithful to the spirit of the original. Sarala Mahabharata is essentially a celebration of the lila of Krishna. So the poet calls it "Vishnu Purana".

The Mahabharata versions in our regional languages (between 10th and 16th centuries) deviate significantly from the classical version in Sanskrit. The basic framework remains; the deviations are at the level of detail and in terms of insight.